Causal-Invariant Cross-Domain Out-of-Distribution Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhu, Jiajie, Wang, Yan, Zhu, Feng, Ding, Pengfei, Liu, Hongyang, Sun, Zhu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhu, Jiajie
Wang, Yan
Zhu, Feng
Ding, Pengfei
Liu, Hongyang
Sun, Zhu
author_facet Zhu, Jiajie
Wang, Yan
Zhu, Feng
Ding, Pengfei
Liu, Hongyang
Sun, Zhu
contents Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) aims to leverage knowledge from a relatively data-richer source domain to address the data sparsity problem in a relatively data-sparser target domain. While CDR methods need to address the distribution shifts between different domains, i.e., cross-domain distribution shifts (CDDS), they typically assume independent and identical distribution (IID) between training and testing data within the target domain. However, this IID assumption rarely holds in real-world scenarios due to single-domain distribution shift (SDDS). The above two co-existing distribution shifts lead to out-of-distribution (OOD) environments that hinder effective knowledge transfer and generalization, ultimately degrading recommendation performance in CDR. To address these co-existing distribution shifts, we propose a novel Causal-Invariant Cross-Domain Out-of-distribution Recommendation framework, called CICDOR. In CICDOR, we first learn dual-level causal structures to infer domain-specific and domain-shared causal-invariant user preferences for tackling both CDDS and SDDS under OOD environments in CDR. Then, we propose an LLM-guided confounder discovery module that seamlessly integrates LLMs with a conventional causal discovery method to extract observed confounders for effective deconfounding, thereby enabling accurate causal-invariant preference inference. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superior recommendation accuracy of CICDOR over state-of-the-art methods across various OOD scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_16532
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal-Invariant Cross-Domain Out-of-Distribution Recommendation
Zhu, Jiajie
Wang, Yan
Zhu, Feng
Ding, Pengfei
Liu, Hongyang
Sun, Zhu
Information Retrieval
Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) aims to leverage knowledge from a relatively data-richer source domain to address the data sparsity problem in a relatively data-sparser target domain. While CDR methods need to address the distribution shifts between different domains, i.e., cross-domain distribution shifts (CDDS), they typically assume independent and identical distribution (IID) between training and testing data within the target domain. However, this IID assumption rarely holds in real-world scenarios due to single-domain distribution shift (SDDS). The above two co-existing distribution shifts lead to out-of-distribution (OOD) environments that hinder effective knowledge transfer and generalization, ultimately degrading recommendation performance in CDR. To address these co-existing distribution shifts, we propose a novel Causal-Invariant Cross-Domain Out-of-distribution Recommendation framework, called CICDOR. In CICDOR, we first learn dual-level causal structures to infer domain-specific and domain-shared causal-invariant user preferences for tackling both CDDS and SDDS under OOD environments in CDR. Then, we propose an LLM-guided confounder discovery module that seamlessly integrates LLMs with a conventional causal discovery method to extract observed confounders for effective deconfounding, thereby enabling accurate causal-invariant preference inference. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superior recommendation accuracy of CICDOR over state-of-the-art methods across various OOD scenarios.
title Causal-Invariant Cross-Domain Out-of-Distribution Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16532